


Halt and Catch Fire

by saltslimes



Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Mentioned Suicide, but if you really CANNOT handle gore just don't ummmm do any digging ok, fuck david cage and his worldbuilding, it's glitch gore?, some gore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-22
Updated: 2018-06-22
Packaged: 2019-05-27 00:29:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,021
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15012734
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/saltslimes/pseuds/saltslimes
Summary: Connor and Hank uncover a cult of sorts. And then Connor falls apart.





	Halt and Catch Fire

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is for one person--you know exactly who you are, and yes, I am sorry
> 
> no beta and its longer than i intended so if its a mess thats not my problem
> 
> ahem. Now i wrote robot h/c, because, well, that’s who i am

_ Prologue: Infection Mechanism _

Earliest models, at least according to the information Connor was able to access after the fact, were programmed to be incapable of lying. Reflecting on that puts him in mind of watching that fish flop around outside its tank. Not pleasant. Not correct or appropriate. It would be been highly inconvenient, he thinks, to be unable to lie. Hunting deviants accounted for most of his existence thus far, and he needed to lie a lot to do it.

In that first interrogation, for example, when he stated that androids could not feel pain. He knew that his human counterparts would have little success getting a confession out of the deviant. They didn’t know how he functioned. They didn’t know what pain  _ meant _ to him, how it expressed and how it affected him. They would have bruised their knuckles on silicon and hollow steel, and then they would have given up.

It was lucky that humans were fairly trusting when it came to androids, or at least, they used to be. And it was lucky that he was able to lie. Otherwise the whole thing would have been a lot harder.

 

_ ACT 1: Dormant Phase _

The case lands on Hank’s desk less by chance and more because he was the only one on the force who happened to have an android partner. Hank flips open the file and skims. Connor is seated at his own desk, doing absolutely nothing. He does that whenever they don’t have a case, sits there like he’s Siri patiently waiting for some instruction.

Literally out of all the androids Hank has met, Connor is the most… android-y. He’s always straightening his tie. He’s like a robot out of a movie, like a skinny terminator or something. He’s some cross between a roomba and a gun. Hank wouldn’t categorize his feelings as fond necessarily. But something in that department.

“Interesting file, Lieutenant?”

“I know we’re at the office, but just Hank is fine.”

“Interesting file?  _ Hank _ ?”

“Did they program you to be a little shit or was that something you freestyled while we were working together?”

“A little bit of both I think.”

“Hmm. Yeah. I mean, interesting is one word for it.” He tosses the file across the space to Connor, who catches it before it can slide off the edge of the table and flips it open. His eyebrows pull down immediately. He can read a lot faster than a human, Hank reflects. “Creepy is another.”

“Androids do commit suicide, Hank. You’ve seen it yourself.”

“Yeah, sure. Group suicide though?”

“I’m… not entirely sure that’s what they were doing.” Connor is still frowning down at the file. Hank can see him lingering on the photos.

“Well, it’s our problem now. So we might as well go check it out.”

It’s raining outside, and the chill of winter is still clinging on with no sign of giving up soon. March weather. Cole really hated March. Well, the few Marches he lived when he had the concept of months and seasons down. 

The thought has crossed Hank’s mind (more times than he would like, honestly) how much did Cyberlife know when they were dressing up their police-bot to send out? Did they know who he’d be working with? Yeah, almost certainly. Did they name him Connor with Hank in mind? 

It’s not a good thought. It’s selfish and masochistic both at once. But it lingers. It’s tied up with the rest of his thoughts, and even on a good day his thoughts are a handful of cold spaghetti, so there’s not much hope of disentangling them.

Connor lingers in the parking lot with his face tilted up, taking in the rain.

“Shit weather, huh? Let’s get a move on,” Hank calls. Connor hesitates before he gets into the car.

“I like it like this,” he says. “In between seasons.”

“Shit, did you download a poetry module or something?” Hank scoffs. Connor ignores him in favor of watching the rain run river tracks on the window.

The crime scene is stale, so it’s not crawling with uniform officers. And it’s not a human murder, so no one had to bag evidence and collect samples before things start rotting. Connor vanishes like a cat with its own ideas as soon as they arrive, and returns a few minutes later looking perplexed.

“Come take a look at this, Lieutenant,” he says, cocking his head to one side. Hank groans and follows him into the next room, away from the ring of corpses lying in puddles of their own blue blood.

“What am I looking at? Buncha scribbles.” That’s actually an understatement. The wall is covered, ceiling to trim. It puts Hank in mind of the RA9 shit, but this feels a bit… wilder. More hasty, certainly. And it’s not just one thing, it’s lots of stuff. Hank mumbles some of it aloud, trying to find some sense to cling onto. “Purity of image--Machine DNA--does any of this make sense to you?”

“Not… exactly,” Connor says slowly. His eyes are flicking back and forth like he’s still reading. Re-reading, maybe, something which an android shouldn’t have to do. His eyebrows stay pulled down. And then he does an about-face and leaves the room.

Hank chases after him. He’s focussed, intent, circling between the bodies. He bends down and unlocks a bio-component from one, cross to another and inserts it. The android shudders to life. Its hand jerkily brings the gun upwards--

“Connor!” Hank cries, jumping forward. But Connor just stands over the thing, watching as it draws the gun to its chin and pulls the trigger. There’s a click.

“Empty,” Connor says. The android pulls the trigger again. Connor removes the skin on his hand and takes hold of its hand. Then he jerks and lets go like he’s been shocked.

“Connor? You okay?” Hank takes a step forward but Connor swiftly unlocks the bio-component he just restored and then takes three quick steps back, like he wants to put as much space between him and the newly re-dead android as possible. “Hey. Talk to me. What the hell happened?”

“That--it--that’s not an android.”

Hank looks back at the thing, frowning. Its head is blown open. He can see plastic and metal and… gunk.

“Uh. Sure looks like one.”

“It’s not… there’s nothing in there. It doesn’t have thoughts. It doesn’t have a personality.”

“So someone wiped its memory?”

“No. Someone wiped its  _ everything _ . It doesn’t even have base protocol. It has a script, and the script does one thing.”

“One thing?” Hank says, although he can pretty much guess.

“Fire the gun.”

“So this isn’t a murder… or a suicide?”

“I don’t know what this is. But we should get these bodies sent to evidence. Maybe one of them has more on it.”

“Yeah. Okay, yeah.”

[][][][][][]

On some days, usually Mondays and Fridays, Hank would drive Connor home, or more frequently, to a bar. Connor wasn’t entirely sure why he brought Connor along and then complained when Connor kept him from consuming dangerous quantities of alcohol. Perhaps it was some kernel of self-preservation instinct. Or he just liked having someone to yell at when he was drunk.

On most Tuesdays and Thursdays Connor would give up on getting Hank to leave the office at an appropriate hour, and just head home on his own. Wednesdays were up in the air. Hank didn’t work when he stayed late, he just sat at his desk and glared at his computer terminal like it has personally wronged him. Connor was designed to understand deviants, not humans, so he’d given up on puzzling out this behavior.

The walk from the station to his place of residence was about an hour, and he enjoyed it. Even today, when it was raining. The ground was slippery with half-melted ice so there’s a constant warning flashing in the side of his view, but it was nice. Bracing, but nice.

He’s passing an alley when someone calls out to him. Not by name.

“Hey, Robocop.”

“Hello,” he says, turning to look. There’s a woman in the alley. Or… an android, he thinks. He’s seen her model before. He knows the face. But her LED is missing. These days, it’s rarer to see an android with one than without. He’s left his on simply because he doesn’t think much about changing his appearance. Someone put thought into how he looks. They were probably right. It was their job to know what he should look like. It was his job to--well, it had been his job to hunt deviants. And now his job was to follow whatever orders his actual paying job provided him.

The android has short lilac-colored hair. The faintest sheen of body glitter. She beckons him closer. In the near distance, he can hear pounding music--no, not hear. It’s broadcasting on the main open signal, the one that service androids used to use to communicate with non-android robots. It’s for android ears only.

“Can I help you?” Connor asks. She smiles. Her smile is mixed with an expression that seems uniquely human, it’s one he’s not sure how to place and doesn’t think he could imitate.

“You’re on the case with the empty bodies, right?”

“That’s confidential DPD information. How do you--”

“Unlucky. I wish someone helped you get out.” Then she reaches forward and grabs him by his tie, pulls him deeper into the alley. He stumbles forward. The music is growing louder. She drags him along, slides open a wide metal door at the end of the alley. Inside, people are dancing. Well, androids. Humans can’t hear the music, so Connor doubts there are any among the crowd of gyrating bodies.

She turns to face him, pressing her whole body up against his.

“You should have quit when you got your freedom.” She’s looking not at him, but past him. And then she nods minutely, and turns and melts into the crowd. Connor takes a step to follow but someone presses their fingers to the back of his neck--his skin deactivates where they make contact.

The colors in the room denature. Blue becomes purple, purple takes on some new unspeakable gradient quality. The sound hazes into some alien thing, yet becomes painfully familiar. The spiralling void of colors between complete shutdown and waking. 

Connor has only died once. He didn’t dream. But he dreamed as he was waking. And when he wakes from hibernation cycles his audio processors warp the street noises outside into something like music, and his visual processors draw shapes that aren’t there into the patterns in the pockmarked linoleum. 

He stumbles forward. His thirium pump regulator is not operating at standard. He tries to engage diagnostic, but it pings up systems he can  _ see _ as absent. According to diagnostic he has no legs but that’s obviously untrue so he shuts it off. He shuts off all the non-essential processes and wades through the teeming mass of dancing bodies, back to the sliding door, back out into the alley.

He blinks. It’s raining. As fast as it came on, the bizarre malfunction is fading. His audio and visual processors right themselves. Diagnostic runs and pings back system stable and fully-functioning. His thirium pump regulator slows to an appropriate speed.

It’s raining. He shuts off wireless capability to block off the open channel--something he can only do now that he’s deviant and free to chose his own missions. Then he walks home.

 

_ ACT 2: Propagation Phase _

Connor’s building was condemned before the revolution. Rotted out apartments in a gutted neighbourhood. But when societies change, or grow cracks, businesses spring up to fill each new niche. Any landlord who was sitting on an empty useless property needed only fit it with a sink and proper power outlet--you could split a one-bedroom into eight or nine units. Connor’s apartment was a closet. It had a charging port he rarely used, a shelf of thirum and a sink he used to wash his clothes.

It made Hank horrendously depressed, but Connor seemed to like it. Hank tried to think back that far--when you’re a kid, and you don’t own anything, buying something for yourself means a lot. He still remembered standing outside the Wal-Mart with his mom yelling for him to hurry it up. He was too busy clawing open the Game Boy’s packaging. Yeah. It meant something that it was  _ his _ , that he earned it mowing lawns and walking the neighbours dogs. It meant no one could take it from him.

Even reflecting on this didn’t make him want to see Connor’s apartment. Once was enough. The sad little shelf with nothing but bottles of blue blood on it. And he’d thought his own home was depressing. He drew the line at stopping outside. Most days Connor beat him to the office, but on the rare occasion he got up at an appropriate time, he would honk the horn a few times outside the building and then begrudgingly text Connor to summon him outside.

Hank drums his fingers on the wheel. His phone buzzes on the empty seat  beside him, and he unlocks it to find a reply from Connor.

“Be right out. -Connor”

Hank’s tried to get him to stop signing his texts, but Connor outright ignores him. He’s considered that it might be somehow built into the way that androids send messages. 

“I’m excited for another day of casework,” Connor says when he gets into the car. His new jacket is almost identical to the one Cyberlife shipped him with--the only difference is that it doesn’t have the glowing android markers on it. And it’s never pressed quite as neatly, since he washes it in the sink. And since he no longer has an endless supply of fresh, identical jackets, it has a notable blood stain on the sleeve. Blood, not thirium, since thirium evaporates. There’s probably some of that on there too though, considering the way Connor practically rolls around in crime scenes.

“You’re one of the only people on this planet who says shit like that, Connor,” Hank says. Connor raises his eyebrows at him.

“Many people enjoy their jobs. You must have enjoyed it at some point.”

“Uh, can’t recall ever liking slogging through paperwork and looking at dead bodies. I  _ do _ recall needing money for a house and and engagement ring and endless pairs of baby jeans.” Once he says that Connor’s expression gets more pensive. Hank can’t see his LED from where he’s sitting, but he’ll put money on it looping into yellow. Rather than run the risk of Connor asking something about Cole, he changes the subject quickly.

“Nina in forensics says that they should be able to get one or two of the other androids running.”

“Good. If one of them talks, we could crack this case.”

Hank purses his lips and doesn’t laugh. But he really wants to know who programed Connor to talk like some combination of Nancy Drew and a guy from any given buddy cop movie. Disconcerting doesn’t even begin to cover it. Endearing… well, he’s not gonna go there. Some days he feels like an idiot who cares too much about his SmartFridge. Other days he feels like it physically hurts to look at Connor. He was deployed in late August, Hank learned. So he was about three months old when they met. 

That’s not good to dwell on. And as a rule, Hank doesn’t dwell on things. He’s gotten  _ really _ good at not dwelling on things.

Connor always seems a little more alert in the evidence lockup. He likes it--obviously, but he rarely smiles, so Hank spots his excitement in other ways. Tapping his fingers together, ignoring Hank, rocking forward slightly when he stands still. He really is like a kid. All the parts of him they never programmed clearly belong to a person who’s been alive less than a year. Six months old. Hank wishes he hadn’t already seen so many guns and dead bodies. He was fifteen the first time he saw a body, and it haunted him for years.

But Connor crosses the room to talk to Nina for a few minutes regarding the androids, and then the two of them boot one up to talk to it. Only it doesn’t talk. Hank sips coffee from a paper cup from the other side of the room and watches Connor look up and make eye contact. The android on the table is holding its empty hand up under its chin, pulling an imaginary trigger over and over.

The others that they manage to wake up act the same. They’re totally wiped. So it’s a dead end. They end up back at their desks. Hank gloomily starts in on some very late paperwork while Connor glares at his terminal like its wronged him personally. It’s like he’s hung or downloading an update or something--just sitting there with his LED looping from blue to yellow and back. Then he springs to life suddenly, puts a hand on his terminal and shuts his eyes.

Hank looks away from the screen (not because he isn’t nosy, but because Connor uses the machine at a dizzying pace that makes it flicker nauseatingly). He drains the dregs of his coffee and considers getting another. Connor is distracted for a moment, so he won’t lecture him, but he probably will by the time he gets back with a fresh cup--Connor lets go of the terminal, eyes wide.

“Lieutenant, you should take a look at this.” He turns the screen to face Hank, who peers at it. “I ran a search for a number of the terms and phrases on the wall at the crime scene. And found this.”

It’s an absolutely shitty, web 2.0-looking site. Red text on a grey background? Good grief. Even the url is weird. D2hh-14-love.neocities.org?

“I’m requesting information on the domain-holder,” Connor says, closing his eyes for a second while his LED flips to yellow. Hank grunts noncommittally and leans in to take a closer look at the text. It’s… disturbing to say the least. There’s what appears to be an almost bible-quote sounding inspirational section, a long screed about connectivity and… 

“Love?” Hank says. Connor’s eyes snap open.

“I’m sorry, Lieutenant?”

“Love. It says: humans cannot understand or speak the language of love. They are unable to commit or empathize on a higher level.”

Connor frowns.

“Commit or empathize,” he repeats, like he’s pondering it.

“What’d the info request bring up?”

“The domain was registered by a human, which makes sense, since very few androids have their own domains at the moment. A person living here in Detroit.”

“Okay. That’s a lead. That’s solid. Let’s go check it out. First though, I’m getting lunch.” 

Connor makes a face like he thinks lunch is irrelevant and also that he doesn’t approve of Hank’s dietary decisions in general terms, but he doesn’t say anything.

“Don’t be sour. We can’t all run on just blood and battery power.”

“Early models had a solar component, but they’ve been largely discontinued.”

“Fascinating. I love android facts and when you tell them to me.”

 

_ ACT 3: Triggering Phase _

The domain owner’s house looks more than abandoned. One of the front windows is held together with tape, and when that clearly didn’t work, wood. Connor wastes no time ringing the bell (doesn’t work) and then hammering on the door.

“We’re pretty much fucked if they don’t answer.”

“Yes. It would be nearly impossible to acquire a warrant with this little evidence,” Connor says. And then someone opens the door. She’s a woman so thin she looks almost like she’s dying. Her hair is in straggly black ribbons, hanging down around her shoulders.

“Can I help you?” she asks.

“We’re with the DPD, investigating a murder case. We were hoping to ask you a some questions,” Connor says. She doesn’t frown, but merely shifts her weight from one foot to the other.

“Maybe it’s rude to ask but, you’re a human, right?” Hank says. “And the owner of d2hh-14-love?”

“Yes… I’m a human. And that’s my site. I run it for a friend. Did you read it?” Something in her expression makes Hank’s skin crawl. Beside him, Connor nods slightly and says nothing.

“Yeah, we read it. Did you know any of these androids?” Hank holds up one of the crime scene photos, and then another.

“No. Wait. Yes, I met one of them. Her.” She pokes the picture with a bony finger. “She talked to my friend about the virus.”

“What virus?” Connor says.

“The one the androids were making. Breakdown or whatever they called it. It mutated out of control, some of the hosts died. So then my friend was talking to her about options.”

“What, like antibiotics for robots?” Hank scoffs.

“I don’t think she means that kind of option,” Connor says. 

“Options like getting out.”

“Out of what?”

“Out of a body. But I don’t know anything about it. That’s the honest truth. You can bring me in for questioning, but I don’t even know how to code. I only helped a little. Plus, I’m pretty sure it’s not a crime.”

“What’s not a crime?”

“Am I arrested?” The woman’s fingers are tightening on the door. Hank glances at Connor.

“No, you aren’t,” Connor says.

“Okay, bye.” She closes the door in their faces. It’s snowing, just a little, even though it was raining the day before. Hank sighs, scrubs a hand down his face.

“I need a drink.”

“That will hardly help your cognitive function,” Connor says, like he was programed to nag Hank about his health, not to solve crimes (well, one crime specifically).

“Yeah, fuck off, I know. You’re not really full of bright ideas today either though.”

“I was merely suggesting--”

“Got a tip for you Connor: humans don’t butt into each other’s business this much.” Even the instant he’s said it he wishes he could take it back, but the words are already out, freezing in their between them. Connor just nods, turns, and walks away. Hank tries to call after him. He does but he just can’t get the words to work. And by the time he even gets his mouth open, Connor is too far off in the distance.

Hank reminds himself that even in that light jacket, it’s not like he’ll be cold. He can apologize tomorrow, they can get back on the case. It won’t be so bad.

[][][][][][]

Connor is so fucking cold. Everything was just a sensor before. Touch, tension were important factors in movement, in contact with humans and objects. He processed injuries the same way he processed audiovisual data. Pain was more of an idea, it was a theory. He never realized that pain and fear were so interconnected. Now feeling things is amazing, and it is also the absolute worst.

And Connor is so cold. Diagnostics are acting up again, because he keeps pinging the temperature and getting back a few degrees above standard.

_ Thirium instability - Cool down hardware immediately _ \- That one is actually an error message, but again, he dismisses it. He tries to get back to thinking about the case. It’s like the answer is right there in front of him, but he has to slog through all of this noise, all this junk data clogging up his mind. Something is not functioning right and he’s never been malfunctioning in all the time he’s existed. And if he ever had been he would have reported to Cyberlife but he can’t  _ go _ back to Cyberlife because Cyberlife still wants to split him open and dig out the virus parts of him.

So he just needs to get home, and then he will… go to sleep for a while, and his diagnostics will reboot and start working probably.

_ Critical thirium instability _ -

That’s not even true because he’d have to be a fair few degrees over human temp for that and he’s walking in the  _ snow _ and he  _ feels _ cold, and wet, and it’s awful, it makes him wish he never had skin. It makes him wish he could crawl out of his body and vanish back into the empty void, the place between where he was either born or just imagined--

That’s when he gets it.

There in the stairwell of his building, as the fire-door swings shut, he  _ gets it _ .

_ Thirium leak detected _ -

And oh, there’s blue on the floor, little spatters of it appearing between his shoes. He looks up at the ceiling first. And then his processor chugs to the conclusion that it’s coming from him. He’s leaking. His nose is leaking overheated thirium, too thin to run his biocomponents properly and then, and then, “oh shit” Hank would say. He collapses on the painted concrete. Audiovisual shuts down. Other major processes follow.

 

_ ACT 4: Execution Phase _

Hank gets three drinks deep, calls himself a cab, bails out of said cab after two blocks, wanders for two more blocks, and then calls another cab. In this one, he enters in Connor’s address instead of his own.

It’s probably pointless. He’s probably going to knock on the door and Connor will be plugged into the closet-thing he sleeps in and he’ll be all “Hank, what are you doing here?” and it’ll be uncomfortable for both of them, but especially Hank. He doesn’t like apologizing and he definitely doesn’t like talking about his feelings.

But he can’t just keep being an asshole. Or, he can, but he shouldn’t. He almost tells the cab to turn around. Six months. It echoes in his head. Strictly speaking, technically speaking, Connor is younger than Cole was when he died. He hasn’t done anything. He hasn’t seen anything. He’s been shot at and he’s killed people. The whole thing is fucked.

The elevator hangs on 14. Hank jams the button a few more times, and then gives up. Connor only lives on the fifth floor. He can handle five floors. He opens the door to the stairwell and trips over a body. Not a body. Connor. He’s sprawled out like he fell or something, and there’s blue everywhere, leaking from his nose and pooled beside his mouth.

“Shit. Fuck!” Hank crouches down--he doesn’t know where to touch--puts a hand on Connor’s shoulder and he stirs. “Oh, thank fuck. Shit.” 

Connor makes a noise that’s not quite a groan.

“Hank,” he says, in his casual “I’m the android sent from Cyberlife” tone, as if he isn’t lying in a pool of his own blood. But he also isn’t looking at Hank. He doesn’t seem to be looking at anything, or not focussing anyways. Hank touches his face. It’s hot. It’s hot as hell.

“You’re burning up. What is this, some kind of system malfunction?”

“Virus,” Connor says. “My thirium overheated. Hank I can’t… I can’t get up right now, you’ll have to wait.”

“I’m not--just. Hang on, okay? I’m going to sit you up.”

“No, don’t--” Connor starts, but Hank is already hauling him up so he can lean against the wall. His nose doesn’t seem to be leaking any more but he takes Connor’s hand and guides him to pinch it shut just in case. As soon as Hank lets go he drops it.

“Hold it there.”

“Sitting up hurts,” Connor says. “Being this low on thirium hurts.” His voice is almost the same tone of whining that teenagers do, and it would be funny if what he said hadn’t just dropped a block of ice into Hank’s stomach.

“It hurts? I thought you said--you said androids don’t feel pain.”

“Yes, I lied, Hank. It’s called being strategic.”

“What the fuck? All this time? When you got shot, you--”

“It wasn’t the same then. Before I was deviant. It was… easy to ignore.”

“Okay, hold on. You hang on, stay right here, don’t move.”

“Moving isn’t an option at the moment.”

“Yeah, good. I’ll be right back.” He’s mentally calculating how fast he can take five flights of stairs without giving himself a heart attack.

“Hank,” Connor calls, but his voice is half-quiet, like he changed his mind mid-way through Hank’s name. Hank pauses. “Don’t go. I can’t… I’m scared.”

“Hey, I’ll be right back. I just--fuck, give me your keys. I just have to get thirium for you and I’ll be right back, okay?”

“They’re in my front jacket pocket.”

“You’re going to be okay, son.” He takes the keys and runs, although he can only manage three flights before he’s wheezing for air, so he takes the last two at more of an express walk.

Connor’s apartment is as barren as ever. Hank grabs two bottles of thirium and dashes back down the stairs. He’s straining his ears for any sound and he’s both relieved and comforted when he hears nothing. But Connor is still there at the bottom. He’s slumped against the wall and pinching his nose shut just like he was when Hank left him. The relief that floods through him almost makes his knees go weak.

“Okay. Okay son, we’re going to--we’re going to get you out of here. And then you can rest.”

“I can’t walk right now. Why can’t I rest here?”

“Because it’s a stairwell and it isn’t comfortable and you just told me you can feel pain. Which I’m pissed about you not telling me before, by the way.”

“I only deceived you because you would have compromised my mission otherwise. And we barely knew each other. It wasn’t personal.”

“I know. Fuck, Connor. You hold onto these, and I’ll get you out of here.”

Connor takes the thirium bottles, but it’s still some doing to get him out of the building. Thank god he never made it past the first floor. Although that thought is sort of awful and chilling, so Hank quits thinking it and focuses instead on lugging the android out of the building. He’s not quite analogous to human weight. A little lighter. There’s not as much blue blood in an android as there is liquid in a human. Mostly plastic and superlight metal, and some sort of composite endoskeleton. 

Hank doesn’t know enough about it. He’s always ignoring Connor when he tells him about it. Now he’s kicking himself, wishing he was an expert on android anatomy.

They make it back out to the street. Hank calls a third cab, and lucky one swings in from just around the block. He loads Connor in and the automated driving program asks him to note that he is incurring extra fees by damaging the upholstery, and they have been charged to his credit card. That’s fine. The thing about your son dying because a doctor is high out of his mind, is that when you sue the hospital you get an unconscionable amount of money, which does absolutely nothing to help, although it makes getting divorced less of a headache. 

“Where are we going?” Connor asks.

“My house.”

“Oh.” There’s a span of silence. Connor looks blankly at the bottles of thirium in his lap. “What for?”

“Because you’re… sick or malfunctioning or whatever, and I want to keep an eye on you.”

“Oh.” Connor is silent for another moment. “I solved the case, I think.”

“Shit, really?”

“Maybe.”

And then, Hank isn’t sure why he does this, but he reaches out and ruffles Connor’s hair. He regrets it as he’s doing it, because he thinks it’ll at best piss him off and at worst upset him. But Connor lets out a soft sigh; his expression becomes totally startled, and he slumps in his seat. And then Hank is terrified that he somehow  _ deactivated _ him or something, but Connor’s hand darts out and takes the edge of Hank’s sleeve. And he just holds on. Hank swallows around the lump in his throat. The cab pulls into the driveway.

He isn’t really sure what to do with Connor, but he figures the principles should be about the same as dealing with a sick kid. Or a malware-ridden laptop. Or maybe somewhere inbetween. What do you do with both of those things? Well, install some updates, or push fluids, and then turn it off and on again basically.

Connor is still burning up when Hank deposits him on the couch, and he looks tired, which is a strange thing to see on an android.

“If you drink some of this are you going to puke it up or whatever.”

“I did not ‘puke’ it up, overheating caused a leak.”

“Are you going to leak it.”

“No. I don’t know. I’m not… operating at maximum capacity. But I restarted my diagnostic process and it’s identifying problems properly now.”

“Not sure I entirely got that.”

“I’m not cold anymore.”

“Okay. Okay, well, that’s a good sign, probably. Drink some of this.” He drops down onto the couch beside Connor and watches him drain half the bottle of thirium and then hold it out to Hank like he’s delivering a piece of evidence. Hank puts the cap back on and sets it on the floor by his feet.

“Feeling any better?”

“I know what happened to the hollow androids.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“They didn’t kill themselves. They left.”

“Left where?”

“They left their bodies. I think they uploaded themselves to the web. Some… private server or something.”

“Wow. You can do that?”

“No. At least, I wouldn’t know how. But I think they figured it out.”

“So what? We have to track down these… consciousnesses online?” Sounded pretty far off from the kind of detective work Hank was good at. If he was good at any of it.

“I mean. We don’t have to put that in our report. We could put that it was a suicide. That they probably wrote a program to wipe each other.”

“And let them do whatever they’re doing out there?”

“I think they just wanted… to be free. I think they wanted to be connected to each other.”

“Would you want that?”

“I don’t know. Would you, if you could? I think I would choose to be here.” Connor says this easily, like he doesn’t really have to think about it.

“Yeah. I guess I would too,” Hank says. Connor is listing to one side. “You tired?”

“I don’t know. I’m something.”

“Haha. Sounds like tired to me. Shut down for a while. I’ll keep an eye on you.”

Connor closes his eyes, but then he opens them again. He finds Hank’s sleeve again and holds on. Sumo is across the room laying in front of the TV and snoring thickly. When Hank first got him from the shelter, he was shy as anything. He didn’t like to be petted and he didn’t like sharing the room with anyone, which suited Hank fine. He only got the dog to get the department-mandated therapist off his back.

But then, in the middle of the night, when he was really drinking with a goal in mind, Sumo would sneak up to him and just nose his hand or prod his leg lightly. Like he wanted to be touched, but he was still afraid. Like he was trying to say “don’t go.”

So he pulls Connor in and wraps his arms around him, and Connor lets out a sound that is almost like a sob but not quite, and a second later takes two big handfuls of Hank’s jacket and clings on.

“I got you. You’re okay,” Hank says. “You’re gonna be fine.” He stays like that until Connor finally goes to sleep, and then he has to go out to the bathroom and sort of grip the sink and not lose his shit for a few minutes. When he comes back in Connor is still asleep on the couch, and he’s still alive, and definitely less overheated than before. It’s all bad. It’s all tenuous. And as Connor is apparently discovering; it all hurts.

But it can be better than terrible. Life, that is. It can even be good.

**Author's Note:**

> so blue blood evaporates and becomes invisible, right? WRONG. There’s blue blood all over the deviant corpses hung up in the evidence locker, LITERALLY FUCK THIS GAME ITS A MESS
> 
> come hang out on my [tumblr](https://saltslimes.tumblr.com/)


End file.
